Harry Belafonte was born on March 1, 1927. Belafonte is a singer, actor, and activist who helped to popularize calypso music in the 1950s.
Belafonte spent his childhood in Jamaica, where he was raised by his grandmother. He returned to the United States as a teenager, and served in the Navy during World War II.
He had his first exposure to the theater when he was given a pair of tickets as a tip while working as a janitor's assistant, and knew very quickly that he wanted to be actor. He began singing in New York clubs in the late 1940s to pay for acting classes. Belafonte frequently shared theater seats with his friend Sidney Poitier. The two would split the cost of a single ticket; one of them watched the first half of the show and explained to the other during intermission what had happened, and the second man watched the rest of the show.
Belafonte performed in several shows with the American Negro Theater in the late 1940s, and made it to Broadway in 1954, winning a Tony Award for his performance in the musical revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. There is a cast recording, but it is not a complete recording of the show, and it includes none of the songs in which Belafonte was featured.
By the mid-1950s, Belafonte's career was taking off on multiple fronts. He began making films, starring with Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, in which Oscar Hammerstein moved the story of Bizet's Carmen to the American South and wrote new English-language lyrics. The film's producers wanted a more operatic vocal style for the film than either Belafonte or Dandridge could provide, and their songs were dubbed by LeVern Hutcherson and Marilyn Horne.
Some of Belafonte's early films stirred controversy for depicting interracial romance. In Island in the Sun, he was paired with Joan Fontaine in a drama set on a Caribbean plantation; The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is a post-apocalyptic love triangle among Belafonte, Mel Ferrer, and Inger Stevens.
And those New York club gigs were also paying off; Belafonte signed a record contract with RCA in 1952, and recorded more than two dozen albums with the label over the next twenty years. The 1953 single "Matilda" introduced him to a national audience. The real breakthrough came with the 1956 album Calypso, which spent 31 weeks at the top of the pop charts, and included two of Belafonte's signature songs— "Jamaica Farewell" and "Banana Boat (Day-O)."
By the late 1950s, Belafonte was involved in the civil rights movement. He helped finance the 1961 Freedom Rides, and was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. He continued to support a variety of political and social causes throughout his career. He was the organizer of the 1985 charity recording "We Are the World," and worked on behalf of African children as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador in the late 1980s.
Politics and performing occasionally intersected. In 1968, Belafonte appeared on a Petula Clark television special. As they recorded a duet, Clark reached out and touched Belafonte's arm. That doesn't sound like much today, but at the time, even that small intimacy between a white woman and a black man was a bold gesture, and something rarely, if ever, seen on American television. A representative of one of the show's advertisers was in the studio, and he asked that Clark and Belafonte re-record the song, standing farther apart. Clark was the show's producer; she not only refused to do a new take, but she destroyed all of the earlier takes of the song, and told NBC that they could air the special with the touch included, or not air it at all. The show aired as recorded, getting strong ratings and generating no public outrage.
Belafonte's performing focus in the 1960s was on music, since he was unhappy with the film roles he was being offered. Among his most notable albums of the decade were a pair of collaborations with foreign singers who were new to American audiences, Miriam Makeba from South Africa and Nana Mouskouri from Greece. And Belafonte's 1962 album The Midnight Special is the first official recording of Bob Dylan, who plays harmonica on the title song.
Belafonte returned to acting briefly in the 1970s in a pair of films directed by and co-starring his longtime friend Sidney Poitier, the Western Buck and the Preacher and the comic crime caper Uptown Saturday Night. He has acted only occasionally since then, but received strong reviews as a 1930s gangster in Robert Altman's 1996 film Kansas City. Most recently, Belafonte had a small role in Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman. For his day of filming on that film, Lee reportedly insisted that the men on his crew wear suits and ties as a sign of respect for Belafonte.
In 1973, Belafonte's long recording career with RCA ended with Play Me, and he has recorded infrequently since then. He continued to be a popular guest on television talk and variety shows, though, and Jim Henson once said that his favorite episode of The Muppet Show was Belafonte's 1978 appearance, featuring a performance of "Turn the World Around" with a Muppet chorus of African masks.
Belafonte received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1989, and the National Medal of Arts in 1994. He was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000, and three of his recordings are in the Grammy Hall of Fame—the song "Banana Boat (Day-O)" and the albums Calypso and Belafonte at Carnegie Hall.
Belafonte's memoir, My Song (e-book | e-audio | print | audio), was published in 2011. Much more of Belafonte's music is available for streaming or download at Freegal.